Legal Research

Spokeo and me.dium - two new ?social network? search engines

By Ted Tjaden

A thanks to colleague Brenda Wong for letting me know of two new “social network” search engines mentioned at a recent SLA event she attended. I was not aware of either. They are: Spokeo and me.dium.

However, maybe I am getting too old. Both seem geared towards the “younger crowd”, at least based on their own descriptions of their products but the first may help with due diligence type of investigations and the second appears to be taking advantage of the “wisdom of the crowd” philosophy.

Spokeo, for example, features a picture of teenage girls whispering in each other’s ears with this tagline: “Want to see something juicy? Spokeo searches deep within 41 major social networks to find truly mouth-watering news about friends and coworkers.” Not for me but perhaps for others.

Me.dium describes itself in these terms:

Me.dium?s Social Search enables our users to find relevant information based on the current surfing activity of other people. In other words, your search results are heavily influenced by what people are actually looking at online right now. This means we tend to surface news, reviews, pictures and videos that are hot, right now, according to crowds of people just like you. And as the activity of the crowds change, as the zeitgeist of the online community shifts, so do Me.dium?s search results. With Me.dium, you?ll always get a real view into what matters to the crowds right now.

I have not tried either product; one of them requires you to download and install a toolbar.

Brenda also mentioned there was discussion of Wikia Search, a search engine mentioned earlier this year on SLAW. This one to me seems more interesting and produces some interesting results with the ability for users to add to search results or improve existing search results.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on October 29, 2008 (boomark / email).